His Quirk Lives On

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This is a trope where one character will adopt one or more traits of another character to remember the latter.

Sometimes, the original character who had that habit, phrase or trait is forgotten, and people mistakenly think that the habit/trait/phrase started with the second character. An example could be James Bond's Catch Phrase: "Bond, James Bond." In the first James Bond novel, it started with the Bond Girl Sylvia Trench, who introduced herself with "Trench, Sylvia Trench"; but only if Bond had adopted the catch phrase as a nod to her.

Also from Naruto, most of Kakashi's bad habits (including his extreme lateness) are actually in memory of his teammate Obito, as shown in the Kakashi Gaiden storyline.

Berserk: After The Eclipse, Guts adds throwing knives to his arsenal, modeled after Judeau. Justified for more than sentimental reasons; as part of the Band of the Hawk, Guts could afford to specialize in melee combat because he was typically backed up on the battlefield by dedicated archers. Once he set out to become a true One-Man Army, he needed a more varied arsenal.

Hikaru no Go: After Sai disappears, Hikaru buys a fan which looks like the one he used to carry and keeps it with him for go games.

After Undine, a Dual Wielding Claymore dies in Claymore, Deneve takes up one of the two swords to be a Dual-Wielder herself in her honor. It's hinted (though not confirmed) that this is what Undine herself had done after another friend's death.

Clare and Helen do the same by mastering respectively Flora's Windcutter and Jean's Drill Sword after their death

In Fruits Basket, Tohru's reason for her adapting overly-polite manners since she was young is due to her insecurities of not looking anything like her father, Katsuya, who used similarly overly-polite speech and manners.

In Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann, later in the series, we have Simon adopting the cockiness, quirks and fashion sense of his big brother mentor, Kamina.

Replica, a Wild Adapter/Stigmata crossover, is pretty much entirely about this trope.

WinterWar has Ikkaku nicknaming his group as Yachiru would have done. Leads to the amusing reveal in the opening chapters that the 'young boy' called 'Peaches' in the rowdy, drunk group causing trouble at an inn is actually Hinamori.

Film

In Shaun of the Dead, Shaun adopts Ed's catch phrase of "two seconds" during the epilogue after Ed's zombiefication.

The final scene of Serenity shows Wash's toy dinosaurs displayed across the cockpit dashboard.

Literature

In The Bartimaeus Trilogy the title character takes the form of his old master Ptolemy to remember him. It's noted that the form is more realistic (small scars and so on) than most of the human forms demons take.

In the second book of The Saga of Darren Shan, the titular character befriends a human boy called Sam. Sam is shown to have a fondness for pickled onions. Near the end of the book Sam is brutally mauled by the Wolfman, and is fatally wounded. Darren is convinced to drink his blood, partly because he has been refusing to drink human blood throughout the book and is now at a point where he will die in a few hours if he doesn't, partly because Sam is going to die regardless of what anyone does, and partly because he is told that part of Sam's spirit will live on in him. At the very end of the book, Darren finds himself craving some pickled onions.

Live Action TV

In Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Buffy takes to referring to her stake as Mr. Pointy some time after the death of Kendra, another slayer who had named her favorite stake Mr. Pointy.

Walter White of Breaking Bad does this a lot, adopting subtle quirks of the people who he's killed or have died because of him. For instance, he starts cutting the crusts off his sandwiches like Krazy-8 used to. Others include taking on Gus Fring's method of using his public persona to blow off people he doesn't want to talk to, or ordering his whiskey on the rocks, the way Hank used to. He also somehow adopts quirks that he had no way of knowing about, as he puts a towel down in front of the toilet to kneel on when vomiting the same way Gus did once, when Walter wasn't even remotely in the vicinity to witness it.

Video Games

In Call of Juarez: Bound in Blood, Ray becomes a pacifist priest to honor the memory of his late youngest brother, William, who always dreamed about it.

Rah in the webcomic Institute of Metaphysics is a polymorph (which in the comic is distinct from a shapeshifter as he has no default form) who took on an unspecified acquaintance's appearance when he [Rah] saw him die.

Western Animation

In The Simpsons episode "Burns's Heir", weeks after Bart left the family to live with Burns, Lisa starts vandalizing the wallpaper.

Marge: Lisa, what are you doing? Lisa: Just trying to fill the void of random, meaningless destruction Bart's absence has left in our hearts. (trips Homer)Marge: Oh, that's sweet, honey.

Community

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